Employee training and education is becoming increasingly critical to the success of organizations within today's modern global economy. As a minimum requirement to remaining competitive, companies that operate in today's complex industries need employees who remain knowledgeable and current in areas of expertise that serve the companies' ever-evolving strategic objectives. Executives of such companies feel this need for improved learning solutions as it is brought to the forefront of their strategic objectives by various business imperatives of the competitive market.
There are a number of forces driving the need for organizations to improve their training organizations. Organization executives are facing urgent business imperatives that demand changes in their training organizations. For example, one such business imperative felt by the executives of many companies is the need to accelerate their “clock speed” when introducing new or repositioning existing product offerings. A difficulty faced by learning systems in supporting this rapid change in business positioning is that many different individuals in a given company perform many different functions and therefore require different types of training to implement a single change in business position. Sales forces in particular must be effectively trained regarding new product features and value propositions before the best sales results can be obtained. Similarly, new positioning of existing products (e.g., pitching groups of products together as providing improved solutions to clients) requires sales forces to understand not just products individually, but their interplay in forming solutions for target clients in order to effectively implement this strategic business objective. The longer such training takes, the more the implementation of strategic business objectives is delayed.
Likewise, learning capabilities of a company must be able to support organization growth and expansion. Leaders of companies may be forced to forgo undertaking bold yet lucrative business growth plans, because bold growth plans require that the company has the ability to rapidly attract, train, and/or deploy a skilled workforce. Thus, improved learning capabilities are needed that accelerate the training speed and speed to competency of an entire workforce.
Similarly, company executives may have a business imperative requiring the initiation of a culture change within the company that will enable a pre-existing workforce to more easily adapt to the company's changing business focus. Learning solutions must therefore also serve as a tool to drive culture change within an organization as an executive's desire to drive a new corporate mindset often has a strong learning component. Common culture change themes that require significant learning efforts include quality control changes, initiatives to increase shareholder value, and steps for adopting a customer-centric business focus.
Furthermore, corporate mergers and reorganizations are commonplace occurrences in many of today's markets and industries. Such mergers and reorganizations often necessitate massive post-merger/reorganization integration efforts by the remaining companies. This not only requires reconciling pre-existing business goals and strategies, but also integrating and upgrading educational and training efforts within the remaining corporate entities. Improved learning solutions are therefore needed to deal with such occurrences by being able to easily modify existing training efforts to match the changing business environment.
Finally, the management of contemporary companies often view their companies' internal training organizations or efforts as bloated cost centers with very little visibility into cost allocation and virtually no accountability when it comes to returning adequate value on learning investments. Since companies are always looking across their organization to identify ways to manage costs, it would be beneficial if learning solutions were able to be used to allocate learning and training costs accurately across different business units and ventures so as to facilitate cost management. It would be further beneficial if such learning solutions could be used to generate strategic cost reductions or even spur or generate profits. With a proper learning solution, it is possible that training can be leveraged outside the organization for revenue growth and cost savings opportunities. Some examples of this include leveraging corporate knowledge in a new way to create a new source of revenue, using training to align value chain partners, or reducing support costs by placing information with the customer.
Increasingly, business organizations are recognizing the need for training organizations that are responsive to the foregoing business imperatives, and that can deliver results that align with business strategies. The learning solutions currently applied in contemporary organizations fail to satisfy these imperatives.
For example, contemporary sales-oriented learning efforts focus on the features and architecture of the product being sold. Product-focused training of sales forces therefore may be inconsistent across product lines, e.g., in terms of objectives and format. This may result in unnecessary and redundant training content, and an ineffectiveness in meeting the business objectives of the organization. This product-focused approach emphasizes the unique or improved product features without incorporating an employer's business goals. Product-focused training is especially detrimental to sales in so-called “high tech,” financial, or computer software industries where a product line may consist of numerous components that can be integrated separately or in various combinations to provide customized “solutions” to clients. The selling employee under a product focused approach is not trained to understand the strategic markets, the customers' business requirements, the overall value potential of a given solution, and the market factors driving the need for the solution. By focusing learning efforts only on a particular product or series of products, the selling employee is not equipped to sell complete solutions that meet customers' and employers' overall corporate objectives.
As another example, contemporary organizations often use their human resource departments or other administrative departments to offer instructor-led training courses for employees at a central location. While this approach may appear attractive from a purely financial perspective because it limits personnel and infrastructure costs, this solution becomes less suitable when the employee students are located in various remote areas (thus requiring travel) and/or have independent, conflicting schedules of availability for instruction. Furthermore, recruiting and training qualified instructors requires significant effort and specialized skills from a learning organization's coordinators. Thus, this approach is less suitable as the number of necessary instructors grows (such as where many courses are needed or where the same is course is needed in various languages).
Computers have been increasingly employed to address many of the logistical issues linked with coordinating the delivery of learning content and/or instruction that needs to be taught multiple times, that needs to be taught to large numbers of students who are remotely located, and/or that needs to be taught to a student body that has conflicting schedules of availability. For example, computer-delivered instruction systems are available wherein students can receive instruction via a computer over a network by accessing a central repository of previously prepared electronic learning (“e-learning”) content courses and/or materials stored on a remote server. This approach can be used to provide independent, self-paced instruction on a student by student basis whereby each student can log on to the remote server and access desired e-learning instructional content at any time. Unfortunately, the compiling and maintenance of self-paced computer delivered training requires both subject matter and technical expertise and much development effort to approach the level of effectiveness of classroom training with an instructor. Additionally, such computer-delivered instruction systems are unfortunately not ideal for all types of learning needs, such as where group activities, student-to-student interactions, or student-to-instructor interactions are essential for optimum learning.
Computer networks have likewise been used to provide virtual classrooms where a single instructor teaches a large number of remotely located students simultaneously using web conferencing, remote presentation or like technologies. While the virtual classroom approach can reduce personnel, travel and physical infrastructure needs and still retains the flexibility of relatively easy course content updating, it does not allow self-paced instruction for students having independent and conflicting schedules of availability. Students of a virtual classroom still have to “attend” class at a pre-scheduled time as opposed to reviewing computer delivered content whenever they have available time or wish to work on a given course. Furthermore, virtual classroom technologies can require that access for every remote student be made via a highly robust computer network capable of handling high bandwidth communications applications. Many organizations simply will not have the technical infrastructure to be able to utilize virtual classrooms for all of their learning needs.
Another disadvantage of contemporary learning solutions is that they fail to provide the ability for executives to monitor performance of learning solution efforts in achieving their underlying purpose of furthering business strategies. It would be helpful if executives had access to various performance or success metrics that measure the performance of a given learning solution similar in manner to how performance is measured in traditional performance driven areas of their core business. Useful metrics relating to a learning solution could include, for example, output-related metrics that indicate course hours produced or student days delivered, and metrics which attempt to quantify the success training is having in serving its intended purpose. The inability to accurately monitor performance metrics leaves organizations and their learning services with an inability to ensure service quality, allow for accurate resource forecasts, allocate costs and provide a means to measure the learning solution's success helping the organizations meet goals and commitments. This aspect makes it difficult for executives and learning administrators to make certain that ongoing and future learning efforts are continuously aligned with business strategies, priorities and goals.
The identification and prioritization of learning needs, the selection of learning approaches, the development of learning content, the delivery of learning instruction, and the overall management and administration learning efforts and content require learning solutions that are responsive to business strategies, imperatives, and logistical factors. Contemporary learning solutions employed in the business world have failed to integrate the many complicated processes and systems that must be implemented to ensure that a given company's learning efforts meet their learning needs as dictated by prioritized business strategies.
Thus, there remains a need in the art for an improved learning solution and related methods that overcome the above-described and other problems associated with current learning solutions for sales-oriented organizations. Such a solution preferably utilizes a customizable blend of computerized on-line instructional systems and instructor based services that allow for the efficient distribution of course content and materials as well as enhance the system response time to instructor, student, and/or resource concerns and issues. The aforementioned learning solutions and related methods should provide the ability to respond quickly and efficiently to logistical and resource concerns in order to minimize the time to achieve sales force competency.